Science, Space and Technology News 2024
New research highlights how human activities, such as bottom trawling, are altering marine fossilization, impacting the preservation and interpretation of the fossil record. These changes can obscure historical data crucial for conservation, emphasizing the need for methods to differentiate between natural and anthropogenic influences in geological studies.
“We are not only changing the environment; we’re also changing the nature of the record that archives this information,” said Michal Kowalewski, the Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology at the. “These changes can be both good and bad. On one hand, human activities can prevent the fossil record from preserving useful information about ongoing changes.
Kowalewski and his colleagues specialize in marine paleoecology and co-authored the study with a focus on fossil beds in the world’s oceans. In these environments, the authors say, there are several interconnected factors that influence fossilization, including the rate at which sediment accumulates on the seafloor, the extent to which animals burrow through the sediment, the depth at which remains are buried, and how quickly certain fossils disintegrate over time.
He recounted one study in which he and colleagues found a distinct lack of large shells from sediment cores drilled into the seafloor. “Given what we now know about the intensity of trawling in some of the areas we were working in, this pattern may just be an artifact of their removal by nets dragged through the seafloor.”Alterations to the fossil record can be indirect as well.
So how do scientists begin to disentangle the various natural and human forces that influence fossilization? It’s complicated, Nawrot said. “It depends on the goal of the study, but there are ways to circumvent these problems.”
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